Simply Authentic...Your Soul Voice is Calling. I Give You My Word

I Give You My Word

Was there any one particular word you were labeled with as a child? Was that word true about you?

I remember a handful of words placed on me. Motor-mouth, for example, was one I heard on the school bus. Apparently I liked to talk a lot on the bus. (No wonder I’m a writer and actor now.) But that’s not “the word”…I’ll get to that in a bit. J

Recently I facilitated a “practice run” weekend workshop. As providence would have it, the participants able to make it that Saturday and Sunday received some pointed insights from the process, while giving me hugely valuable feedback.

One of the most poignant exercises was sharing our “word.” This stemmed from something I read in Julia Cameron’s THE VEIN OF GOLD (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996) wherein she shared a story about composer Michael Hoppe (http://www.michaelhoppe.com/). I have read Cameron’s books before – but, interestingly – didn’t pull this one (a gift) out again until after I had met Mr. Hoppe personally. I sang one of his songs at the Transformational Voice Institute graduation ceremony, after I had completed the apprentice voice teacher training. I find Michael Hoppe to be gifted, gentle, insightful, and basically a wonderful man.

Paraphrasing Cameron, Michael Hoppe was denigrated a “dreamer” as a child and not encouraged to take his music and composition dreams seriously. As a result, he became an executive in the record industry, representing other artists’ works. One “happy” day (Hoppe himself was mortified at the time) his own work accidentally came up at the end of the reel of music he had presented sharing the works of other composers. But that accidentally-at-the-end-of-the-tape-composer was precisely what that particular film producer was looking for. And the “dreamer” began to embrace the dream.

For one of my workshop participants, the word was “sensitive”, feeling everything, it’s like I need to walk on egg-shells around you.

MY word was “instigator.” Always the one starting things. I knew how to get things going. Yet I often suppressed that gift because I had a feeling it was a “bad” thing. Thankfully, I came to embrace my instigator as an innovator and connector later in life.

I encourage you to identify your word, whatever it might have been. And then turn it around…what are the innate strengths in that word? In you?

I want every little girl who’s told she’s bossy, to be told instead she has leadership skills. –Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook

Authentically Yours,

Laura